Enric Majoral, expanded jewellery

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“ Craftsmanship is not just about working with your hands, but with your hands, intelligence, technique and heart.”

Enric Majoral

Formentera and Enric Majoral, craftsmanship and design

When the name of Enric Majoral is mentioned, one immediately thinks of Formentera. The jeweller’s close relationship with the island is inseparable and we would venture to say that these days, one cannot be explained without the other.Formentera was a discovery of such intensity for Majoral that he immediately made it his own and laid down roots there. He explains that his creations are “the essence of Formentera”, and today the island thanks him for his presence, his life project and his professional career, while acknowledging him as a cultural inspiration that has put Formentera on the cultural map of art between craftsmanship and design.Immersed in the authenticity of the virgin island landscape, Majoral entered the world of trades of ancient and family tradition. This path would help him to develop his creative talents from then on, with a special symbiosis between conception and materialisation. In other words, between the idea and the use of materials and tools, or the implementation of what the mind conceives and which, once transferred to paper, ends up taking shape with the hands. That is why his pieces are “fashioned”, the result of the joy of caressing and mastering the materials.Eschewing all conventionalism, the open gaze led him to look back and be inspired by archaic forms, by Antiquity, using the quintessential jewellery materials, gold and silver, full of symbolism and multiple meanings.It mattered little that a current was also arising in Europe in the 1970s as a result of the new sociocultural trends resulting from May 1968. Removed from the styles and trends of the day, Majoral created freely in Formentera, from the inspiration that the island offered him, immersed, as we said, in his luminous energy and a virgin culture, still anchored at the time in a past that was no longer known to the urban world from which he came and where the aforementioned trends took hold.

Naturally, this freedom has led him to experiment with everything he considers suggestive: colour, painting the pieces; materials taken from land and sea; new materials... As such, he ended up forging his own universe linked with other new creative paths of different origin, but with a common nexus, experimentation and lack of limits, beyond the stereotypes that until then reigned in the world of jewellery.

Majoral broke with convention by looking to the past to reach the essence of jewellery. He makes jewellery an intellectual, artisanal and emotional activity at the same time, as it is an activity intimately linked to life or, perhaps, it is life itself. He also has not stopped using traditional metals, as many jewellers of the European “new jewellery” did, working, as he did, outside schools and manifestos.

Despite being a bird of the forest, he is not a loner and is in fact quite the contrary. From the mid-1980s, he was in contact with Orfebres FAD, an association founded in 1979 to promote goldsmithing, both through professional partnerships and increasing public visibility through exhibitions and all kinds of events. He met and shared this idea with his colleagues and later served as its president from 1992 to 1997. During this period, he established his work, which was recognised with several awards. He also opened his workshop-shops in Formentera and Barcelona, a new way of bringing the public closer to jewellery, because Majoral never forgets the user, and always keeps in mind that jewellery must be worn, experienced and personalised. He knows how to find the balance between creation and marketing, which means nothing more than the public, meaning those who admire jewellery and delight in wearing it.

However, not everything ends here, because he has also promoted various events related to jewellery, always in close collaboration with Dolors Ballester, a photographer and illustrator, with whom he shares his life and work.

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Pilar Vélez Director of the Design Museum of Barcelona

Formentera and Enric Majoral, craftsmanship and design 4

Pilar Vélez

Enric Majoral, jeweller 30Maia Creus

Formentera, from the house-workshop to the workshop-shop 38 Formentera – Barcelona – Formentera 46 His encounter with contemporary jewellery 64 Shape-jewellery 72 Image-jewellery 76 Capelletes 78 Cuconets and Bajoques 86 Container-jewellery 94 Trossos de Formentera 98 Woollen jewellery 102 Posidònia, organic jewellery 104 Needle and thread 108 Coming and going, divorced from method 118 Àfrica 124 To grow or to shrink 126 Joies de sorra 128 Bronze, a side project 142 Drawn jewellery 154 Retorn a Formentera 162 The gesture, the jeweller’s mode of activity 170 Taller 2000, innovation and craftsmanship 184 Roc Majoral, everything learned at home 186 The beginning of uncertainty, a form of creativity 214 Naming the collections 224 Monochrome in Majoral jewellery 228 Expanded jewellery 230

The sea below is the same as that above 244Pilar Bonet

Enric Majoral, materiality 248Martín Azúa

Collections 1982–2020 252Enric Majoral – Roc Majoral, biographies 260

Index

9 Necklace Moher 2003 Gold and mohair wool

Pendants Capelletes 1996-1997 Silver and gold12 13 Object Pots 2004 Patinated bronze

Bracelet Blocs 2006 Silver and batik technique14 15 Pendant 2005 Silver and coral

Earrings Batik 2003 Silver and gold16 17 Ring Cascall 2003 Gold and mohair wool (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera)

Pendant Àfrica 2001 Silver, gold and coral18 19 Pendant Cuconets 1999 Silver and acrylic paint

Earrings Africana 2010 Gold (Roc Majoral)20 21 Pendant Tresor 2011 Gold and nylon thread (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera)

Bracelet Joies de sorra 2005 Silver and acrylic paint24 25 Brooch Joies de sorra 2007 Blued silver

Enric Majoral, jeweller

The canon has created a model paradigm to construct the story of the life and work of a creator explained as a heroic and autonomous journey that culminates when it reaches the canon, that is, the museum, the gallery and an exquisite market of experts. An alternative to this model would be historical hermeneutics, which considers the circumstances accompanying a creator’s background when analysing and explaining it. Certainly every expressive act springs from an unfathomable need and inner freedom, but it is also true that the creative self is formed and takes shape in a context, in a cultural and social space understood as a substrate of knowledge, skills and memories available for revising, reinterpreting and reformulating. This text about the life and work of the jeweller Enric Majoral is inspired by the latter option.

Spanning decades, Enric Majoral’s professional career is based on curiosity, experimentation, research and artisanal working methods and techniques developed in the workshop. However, his creative personality cannot be separated from his conscious choice to situate his life experience as an inseparable substrate for the gradual accumulation of knowledge that is generated and configured on the map of his life, as well as his decision to use his creativity by relating it to this map of intuitions and knowledge that shapes the imprint that people, things, nature and culture leave on the mind and body of the creative subject. This ebb and flow between ways of living and ways of doing things defines Enric Majoral’s creative structure and professional background. In fact, it is the substrate that sustains his calling, which emerges from within as an inner need that demands to be heard and channelled. Each creative stage is like a chapter of his life, and this path is precisely what Enric Majoral has made visible and given form to as a jeweller in his jewellery and collections for decades.

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Maia Creus PhD in Art History, curator and art critic

We think that in our era, the artisanal spirit based on the union of making and thinking, of mind and body, coexists perfectly with the free spirit of the intuitions, originality and experimentation that so identify the worlds of art and jewellery. Therefore, we need not speak of the jeweller as an artist or of art jewellery, since jewellery today is a discipline that has freely and independently become hybridised with other languages of the visual and object arts. However, to understand how jewellery evolved over the 20th century and write a historical account of its leading figures, we must examine the decades-long discussion that has supported and determined the transformation of the jewellery sector as we know it today.

In Catalonia, this discussion has taken its own turn in line with international movements and it has a common starting point with the foray of historical avant-garde artists into the world of jewellery and its consequent transformation into art. Freeing jewellery from its known languages has produced new critical categories aimed at making this transformation comprehensive: artist jewellery, artisan jewellery, designer jewellery, author’s jewellery, art jewellery, new jewellery and contemporary jewellery. These new concepts for new ideas and ways of doing things are useful to us to understand the culture of jewellery in the 21st century, characterised by its pairings with other languages and disciplines and its ready embrace of procedures, attitudes and concepts from artistic and cultural practices that define sensibilities today.

Enric Majoral’s creative journey began in the mid-1970s in Formentera, amidst this transformation in the jewellery sector.

He knew about and followed this discussion, though he was immersed in circumstances very different from the cultural and social environments that promoted the renewal of jewellery in Barcelona: the Foment de les Arts i del Disseny (FAD), Escola

Massana and the Museum of Decorative Arts. It was a scene that he followed but in which he did not participate directly because his foray into the world of jewellery took place in a very different context and circumstances. Majoral’s creative career began and unfolded on the fringes, which does not mean that he is a fringe creator, but a conceptual and professionally decentralised one who has developed his own unique and creative work without going through the usual training, either under a master in his workshop or at a specialised school.

Creating on the fringes instead of letting himself get boxed in has been central to the life and professional circumstances of Enric Majoral, fostering a unique approach to the jeweller’s profession inspired by his experience of living and cohabiting in Formentera. A habitat sustained by ancestral ways of doing things. A place that was paramount to him. A legendary land that led to a reconquered ingenuousness in the 1970s. The ingenuousness of asking questions as if they had never been asked before. An ingenuousness that is subversive because it produces knowledge and actions outside of conventions and produces other forms of life and work that challenge everything that is supposed to be known and should be done. Despite being original, this first context and these initial circumstances alone do not explain Enric Majoral’s complex creative and professional development.

The artisan who learns and makes himself at home in the cradle of the Mediterranean tradition and who seeks reward and satisfaction in mastering materials, tools and a job well done, coexists with the experimental and expressive needs of the artist, open and receptive to the heritage received from contemporary culture in its many versions. To this must be added the unalterable conviction of placing the world of jewellery and its values at the heart of his life and professional

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Maia Creus

career. Hence, for Enric Majoral, the workshop has also been a place to forge critical concepts, a place from which to look, understand and act accordingly.

In the 1970s, Formentera was a truly legendary place where many archetypal elements of Mediterranean culture and landscape had been untouched by pollution, including cultural contagion. Attracted by the lush natural landscape, saturated with traces of an ancient and persistent society, artisans, artists and creators from all over came to the island to stay. Enric Majoral was one of those young people who moved to the island to reinvent a way of life and build a family outside conventions with his partner Dolors Ballester, a professional photographer interested in reinventing the models of femininity she received, like so many other young women of her generation. Surrounded by stone and water and open to unprecedented experiences, together they absorbed and learned from everything around them.

To live in Formentera, you had to be rich or work as a waiter or in the construction industry. For Enric and Dolors, this meant helping to destroy the paradise accommodating them. Therefore, they pursued craftsmanship, a form of work that allowed them to create a family economy compatible with the model of life they had chosen. Inspired by artisans working with clothing, leather and metal who were based in Ibiza after having travelled to India, they focused on jewellery. The workshop became the home of the craftsman, a habitat inside the house: a room where Enric Majoral learned from a form of knowledge based on the fusion of intuition and craft. He soon realised that the hand is the window to the mind and the jeweller’s tool is an extension of the body.

Today, Enric Majoral is internationally renowned as a unique jeweller who maintains his link with an ancestral place and culture: a repertoire of symbols and references at the base of his particular style, which is contemporary and timeless at the same time. Hence his way of putting artisanal and intuitive processes into play with research and technological innovation. The origin of a work that maintains a constant movement between the unique experimental piece that is often the origin of the release of new collections. A constant that has given rise to the particular Majoral seal. A successful brand that has won over loyal customers and a benchmark of forms and ways of working for new generations of jewellery professionals.

Enric Majoral at the workshop Can Pep Riera La Mola, Formentera 1979

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Maia Creus

Enric Majoral at the house-workshop Dolors Ballester at the workshop

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Shop-Workshop 1983 Enric Majoral at the workshop 1984

Can Pep XumeuLa Mola, Formentera

Formentera, from the house-workshop to the workshop-shop

A landscape, a culture, circumstances of life determine Enric Majoral’s trade as a jeweller, who admits that he approached jewellery from the imagination, as an apprentice who wanted to know everything about a profession of which he knew absolutely nothing.

At first, Enric Majoral’s jewellery was above all a representation of his concept of jewellery, based on its anthropological, symbolic values and social uses.

From this conceptual framework and with the tools of a craftsman, he began the first silver jewellery in which all the prominence was taken by the central stone—lapis lazuli, onyx, emeralds and other semi-precious stones—exalted with an ornamental pattern of symmetrical distribution surrounding them. A work dominated by horror vacui with an intervention spread over the entire surface of the metal. The jewel is the stone that shines in the centre and the craftsman puts himself in its service.

“ Formentera was then a truly mythical place. If you listened intently to the sounds in the air, you could hear the voices of the Phoenicians and Romans. This defines the great silence that greeted us, so immense that you could really imagine and feel what you wanted.”

Earrings 1977 Silver and lapis lazuli 38 39 Necklace 1976 Silver and lapis lazuli